Not quite normal, or is it?

Well certainly America hasn’t been normal lately, and neither have I. For one, I haven’t been hyper. Hold it right there, mister, that’s like the forewarning of the end of time or something. That’s what I’m betting on too, which is why I’ve been buying raffle tickets at work lately. I have no idea what they’re for, or if they’re even legal, but I figure this must be the end, so what the hell. In addition to that, I’ve been going to bed before midnight. Whoa Nelly. Nor have I eaten as much lately. That’s it, it’s over.

But don’t despair quite yet, some things have remained normal. Like belching. It seems now that my internal settings have finally adjusted and actually managed to fight off my Acid Reflux medication so that now I’m back to my normal belching self. Well, not quite all the way back, but getting there.

Next, I managed a volleyball comeback. Oh yeah, I hit the court this past Monday night for some 4man warm-up. And I was good. So quite appropriately, when we actually played Wednesday, I sucked. But it was good to be out there again. For my mental state anyway, not so much for my feet. The only saving grace there was it was on sand as opposed to a hard court (grass or indoor). So of course neither doctor is returning my calls and I can’t get a referral for physical therapy. Ugh. So I won’t be on my feet much for awhile.

Which is ok because I’ll be traveling. Exotic places like Moline, Dubuque and Ames. Oh yeah. True to normalcy, I’ll be flying to Moline, driving up to Dubuque, over to Ames, back to Dubuque, then back to Moline so I can fly back again. It’s 1.5 hrs from Moline to Dubuque and 3hrs from Dubuque to Ames. Should be fun. During this time I will miss volleyball and have to try and squeeze in Monday Night Football (though in reality I don’t think I want to watch Green Bay beat the crap out of the Skins).

As previously reported I’m having to write these ramblings in a delayed state as I currently have no web-mail access at work. This situation may be indefinite. Not having easy access to email at work has forced me to ponder other pursuits to keep me diverted during the day, such as poking my own eyes with a sharp stick. Hell, it doesn’t really have to be sharp now, does it? Of course, I could actually try and do some work, but that wouldn’t be normal.

So instead I returned to doing what I do best. No, not that, that would get me fired. I’m talking about breaking stuff. We are in the pre-release testing of some new software. Part of my job is to test out some communications within the packages. I don’t really know what that means, but it doesn’t matter as I didn’t even get that far. Within seconds I’m calling on my co-workers for help.

In his usual ‘for the love of God Clay, can’t you do anything on your own’ voice, John responds with, "I’ll be right over." Which then prompted the all too familiar, "Hmm, I’ve never seen that before." Now we’re at the stage of "try this" and "this will work", which always leads to, "wow, that really IS odd." Of course, in tight quarters, this always leads to ‘stumping challenge’, which goes like, "hey guys, you gotta see this!"

I don’t think you could stick any more geeks in that cube. After way too long talking about words and acronyms I still don't understand, we had one reasonable explanation – dual processor. While this shouldn’t matter, there were some other noted problems because of this and it was certainly one thing that was different about my setup than others so it was worth a look. But we did note the one other difference for fun – left-handed mouse setup. I can say we are thorough, if not useless. (I.e., the mouse pointer functionality is a computer setting which passes standard info regardless of application).

Which is exactly why the left-hand was again a sign of evil. Somehow the setting, which should be not be recognizable by the application, is thrown off in the Java interface of the software. Unbelievable. I don’t even understand how a programmer could force the application to determine the difference, but then again I don’t understand driving directions either. So now the want to use my as a guinea pig for all future testing, great.